A sitemap and robots.txt are small files with an outsized effect on how quickly search engines notice and correctly index a site that's just moved — and they're easy to forget entirely during a Framer export or migration.
What Framer provides by default
Framer auto-generates a basic sitemap.xml and robots.txt for published sites, pointing at your Framer-hosted URLs. That's fine while you're on Framer's hosting — but once you export and move to a new domain or a different hosting provider (even on the same domain), those generated files either don't exist anymore or still point at the old URLs, which is actively unhelpful.
What to actually set up post-migration
A fresh sitemap.xml listing every real route on your new hosting, with correct <loc> URLs matching your live domain. If your export tool doesn't generate one automatically, this is straightforward to build from your route list — one <url> entry per page.
A robots.txt that references your new sitemap location and doesn't accidentally block anything you want crawled (a leftover Disallow: / from a staging setup is a classic self-inflicted SEO wound — always double check this after any migration).
Resubmission in Search Console. Even with a correct sitemap live, submitting it explicitly in Google Search Console (Sitemaps section) speeds up discovery rather than waiting for organic re-crawling.
If your domain changed too
This is the higher-stakes version of the same problem. If you moved from a Framer subdomain (or even your custom domain, if the hosting stack changed enough to affect canonical URLs) to a genuinely new domain, you also need:
- 301 redirects from old URLs to new ones, wherever technically possible
- A Change of Address submission in Search Console, if it's a true domain change
- Patience — a domain migration typically takes Google several weeks to fully re-associate ranking signals with the new domain, even with everything done correctly
The one-line takeaway
Treat sitemap/robots.txt as part of the migration checklist, not an afterthought — they're the mechanism search engines use to efficiently discover that anything changed at all, and skipping them doesn't break your site visually, which is exactly why it's easy to miss until organic traffic quietly drops a few weeks later.